Prompt # 9- We're still here.

He steps out of his apartment on the fourth floor. The disinfectant hits his nostrils and he cringes every time. That lady needs a day off he thinks. Then he remembers to pay his rent tomorrow. Got to go to work for that. Out of his jacket pocket come a two keys. One to the dead bolt the other door handle. He locks them both.

The stairs are twenty feet to his left. He walks to them trying to remember what he watched last night. He knows it wasn't that good, but he had watched a movie.

Down the stairs.

On the third floor he remembers it was a psycho-analysis of a young women with multiple personality disorder. What was her name? Vickie?

Down the next flight. His mental struggle ceases at the second floor. Vickie was one of her personalities. The name of the movie was Sybil.

He's about to go down that next flight.

“Crannies. They're stored in the nooks and crannies of every room. It's information.”

This strikes him odd thing to hear and he stops, not wanting the conversation to end if he keeps moving.

“I'll tell you what they call them, black sheep. It's the stuff nobody wants to say and it gets pushed into the corners of space in our rooms and offices. It's all the dirty, cheap, disgusting things we want to, no, no, need to say, and don't.”

“It runs around, scrambles for an audience, to be represented for god's sake! No one will have it and it just bunches up there those places you don't look. It condenses, turns into heavy matter. And I'll tell you something... it drives people mad.”

From his perch hearing all of this, the man who lived on the fourth floor had a thought that this was one of those crannies. A cache of discarded sub-conscious material that revealed itself to him in third person, as a person in conversation. It had wanted him to ease-drop. If he had gone any further he would have thought no one there and written it off as getting too old. Now he knew he was mad. He went through the rest of the day hearing all those dark things people so easily kept from coming out.

The police got a domestic dispute complaint from the man's neighbor a few days later and the landlord told them he had not yet paid his rent. When they finally got in the door they found him on his knees, his hands pressed up against each of the perpendicular walls. He was screaming into a corner. It sounded like gibberish to the police. They got him away from it and he said “I feel better now, I let it out.”

He patted the officer on the shoulder and told him he should try it sometime.